Volition

I really don't know why people dislike Sendmail so much. Sure, it has the odd security vunerability, but no more than other majory components of the Free Software stack. It really isn't that hard to configure, either. Just keep the README handy (located at /usr/share/sendmail/cf/README on a standard FreeBSD install) and if not sure, just sprinkle dnl through your sendmail.mc (or equivalent) file until it works.

Honestly, it is an excellent Mail Transfer Agent. Part the way into this week's little outage *cough*, I had to set up my secondary machine to spool incoming mail for the 12-ish domains I host. I would have hated the originating MTAs to have suddently started dropping all the pending mail as undeliverable after 5 days. It only took me an hour or two to set up and get working. Most of that was waiting for key strokes entered into ssh sessions to get echoed from the other side of the world. Pegging the local link by uploading a few hundreds of megs of configuration and website data via a minimal ADSL connection does not do good things for command line responsiveness.

It also made massaging through the ~7500 spooled messages from the last 7 days in some sort of priority order very easy. I've long known you can start Sendmail processing the queue manually by issuing a sendmail -q, but you can also specify the obvious -v to get it to print what it is doing, which includes dumping out the SMTP transaction as it happens - very informative. Even better, as this page describes well, you can get it processing the queue for only specific messages with matching recipients (-qRfoo to match messages with 'foo' in the recipient list), matching senders (-qSfoo) and using other criteria. So I was able to get high-priority stuff through first, and let the rest of the queue get dealt with normally.

The queue is now down to ~370 messages, after I stopped mail getting delivered to it on Tursday night and that is all undeliverable spam bounces. Things are almost back to normal. So quit ragging on Sendmail, man. It is capable, solid as a rock and has delivered more mail than any of these new-fangled startups could ever hope to. So there.